Of raging poppy fascists, rabid dog owners, raising the Berlin Wall (and amputating the arms of Supertramp’s lead guitarist)
Sometimes, life is kind to time-pressed, autumn-weary columnists. When looking out of the window is like hearing an endless loop of Supertramp’s Godawful ditty ‘It’s raining again’, it’s hard to think of things to write.
You read about the ‘Slumdog Millionaire director [wanting] to tackle the tale of Aron Ralston, the trapped climber who amputated his own arm with a pocketknife in 2003‘…
… and you think, ‘Good!’.
Not ‘good’ that someone is making a film but ‘good’ that someone, at some point in time, had a demonstratively worse time of it than you are having now. Thinking of someone having to saw off their arm with a blunt Boy Scout knife can be strangely comforting.
So, it’s nice when the online newspapers, occasionally, bring us bits of news that columnists and lowly bloggers can copy/paste without having to add any suave comment, bon mot or sniggering aside. Something like the following, in other words:
“Riga- In an incident that is sure to warm the hearts of news editors everywhere, a man is alleged to have bitten two people following a dog show in the Latvian capital, Riga, on Sunday, the Baltic News Service reported Tuesday. Police were called after a 27-year-old dog handler from Slovenia reacted in canine fashion when the dog he was parading failed to perform as well as he had hoped.”
Obviously, you could try to add more spices to the story broth, using this sad dog owner as a stand-in metaphor for the debt-ridden, apathic, dumbed down, celebrity obsessed people in the West, whose sense of entitlement is even bigger than their flat screen TVs…
… but why bother?
Why bring coal to Newcastle – or, to use a slightly more modern equivalent: Soldiers to Afghanistan – when the stories themselves have better built-in metaphors than any commentator can hope to make up?
What can you do but shrug when you read about ‘poppy fascists’ – and what more can you do than whisper ‘But of course…!’, when you read the following story?
“Fans hoping to catch a glimpse of U2’s free concert celebrating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall will have - in the words of one of the band’s biggest hits - to “scale these city walls”, after organisers threw up a massive barrier to block the view for those without tickets.”
To be honest, I’d rather have my ears amputated than listen to Bono but chacun son goût and all that rot.
Anyway, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to looking out of my window, staring at the rain and contemplating how nice it would be to amputate the arms of all the members of Supertramp with a blunt and rusty pocketknife…
See you tomorrow.
(Yes, I know it’s bloody awful but I don’t see why I should be the only one to suffer here…)
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